Jo worked doggedly to build on her early successes with critics. She did much else in her life, of course. She raised her son. She fell in love with the painter Isaac Israëls, then broke it off when she realized he was not interested in marriage. She eventually remarried: yet another Dutch painter, Johan Cohen Gosschalk. She became a member of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers’ party and a co-founder of an organization devoted to labor and women’s rights. But all these activities were woven around the task of managing her brother-in-law’s post-mortem career. “You see her thinking out loud,” Hans Luijten told me. In the early days, he said, she went about it as modestly as one could imagine: “She identifies an important gallery in Amsterdam and she goes there: a 30-year-old woman, with a little boy at her side and a painting under her arm. She writes to people across Europe.”
Her training as a language teacher — she knew French, German and English — came in especially handy as she expanded her reach, attracting the interest of galleries and museums in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen. In 1895, when Jo was 33, the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard included 20 van Goghs in a show. Vincent’s intensely personal and emotion-filled approach had been ahead of its time, but time was catching up; in Antwerp, a group of young artists who saw him as a trailblazer asked to borrow several van Goghs to exhibit alongside their own work.
Jo learned the tricks of the trade — for example, to hold onto the best works but to include them as “on loan” alongside paintings that were for sale in a given show. “She knew that if you put a few top works on the wall, people will be stimulated to buy the works next to them,” Luijten says. “She did that all over Europe, in more than 100 shows.” A key to her success, says Martin Bailey, an author of several books on the artist, including “Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum,” was in “selling the works in a controlled way, gradually introducing van Gogh to the public.” For an exhibit in Paris in 1908, for instance, she sent 100 works but stipulated that a quarter of them were not for sale. The dealer begged her to reconsider; she held firm. Bucking her tendency to doubt herself, she proceeded methodically and inexorably, like a general conquering territory.
In 1905, she arranged a major exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s premier modern-art showcase. She reckoned that it was time for a grand statement. The success she had had in promoting her brother-in-law’s art boosted her self-confidence. As more and more people in the field came to agree with her assessment of Vincent, she shed her youthful hesitancy. Rather than hand over the task of organizing the show, she insisted on doing everything herself. She rented the galleries, printed the posters, assembled names of important people to invite, even bought bow ties for the staff. Her son, Vincent, now 15, wrote out the invitations. The result was, and remains, the largest-ever van Gogh exhibition, with 484 works on display.
